Who are the Taliban?

The headlines in recent weeks have been chilling: "Taliban adopting Iraq-style jihad." "Taliban becoming more brutal than the Taliban who ruled before them." "Taliban committing atrocities in Afghanistan."

It's enough to make one wonder what the heck happened in the time since U.S.-led forces apparently routed the vile Taliban from Afghanistan a scant five years ago. What allowed the Taliban to return on such a grand and menacing scale?

Back in December 2001, when the bombs finally stopped falling, Afghans were showered with promises of unending fealty, reconstruction money, security and, of course, a flowering of democracy. Alas, none of these promises have been kept.

If we're to believe NATO, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, or British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the reason these promises have yet to be fulfilled can be summed up in one word — Taliban.

Tony Blair paid a surprise visit to British troops in southern Afghanistan this past week. Standing in the Afghan sand, Blair declared that "Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided." He went on to tell the assembled soldiers and media that the "defeat of the Taliban is not just on behalf of Afghanistan but the people of Britain," indeed of all democratic nations.

The elusive Taliban

Of course, the big question that dogs soldiers, not just in Kandahar and Helmand, but also in the whole of NATO's Afghanistan operation, is who exactly are these Taliban?

Certainly not the civilians killed in a recent NATO bombing raid in Kandahar, a raid in which Canadian soldiers participated. Depending on the report one reads, anywhere from 15 to 70 civilians died in that operation.

Certainly not the majority of the more than 500 other Taliban fighters NATO claims to have killed in the past two months. In a recent Sunday Times article, a senior foreign official in the British government claimed that many of those killed in Kandahar were not Taliban, but Noorzai tribesman outraged by the presence of a rival Achekzai warlord.

And certainly not 60-year-old Abdul Qarim, who lost his wife, his two sons and his two daughters in a NATO attack on his village. Qarim was a farmer and his family were Tajiks, not Taliban.

Even Afghan intelligence has admitted that the Taliban are "a leaderless hybrid shadow of [their] original form, with three different and often competing headquarters in Pakistan."

The reality, it seems, is that NATO is not fighting a single coherent insurgent army, but a hodgepodge of bubbling resentment that is part counter-insurgency, part tribal warfare, and part protest against the corrupt misrule from Kabul.

If anything, what the designation Taliban now refers to is an attitude, a social movement, and a historical current. Taliban in its broadest sense seems to mean those who do Talibanish things. They no doubt include people associated with the former Taliban regime, as well as Arab Islamists who settled in Afghanistan during the war, and renegade mujahedeen guerrillas such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a one-time client of the West and the man who garnered the greatest amount of U.S. military aid to Afghanistan during the anti-Communist campaigns of the '80s.

The Taliban had once seemed an attractive alternative to a horrible situation. Their appeal spread across the majority Pashtun population and beyond, because they offered a kind of honesty in civil society and government and the order that goes with it that was sorely absent from Afghanistan once the Soviet Union ended its 20-year attempt to dominate the country.

Blinkered thinking

Now we are led to believe that these same Taliban are back, and that their threat is growing. Quite frankly, that's giving far too much credit to this new version of the Taliban, and it is far too convenient perhaps to those who want to sweep all the problems of Afghanistan under the same Taliban rug.

We've seen what this kind of limited thinking has produced in Iraq. There, allied forces, governments and the media insisted for far too long that the conflict was an us-them situation, with al-Qaeda forces pitted against the democratic forces of the U.S. and the so-called coalition of the willing. We now know that strife in Iraq has as much to do with internal differences than direct opposition to Western desires to plant the seed of democracy and nip global terrorism in the bud.

Perhaps what has happened in Iraq was inevitable. Perhaps. But perhaps earlier recognition of what was going on might have averted some of the violence that has become part of everyday life in Iraq.

All of this, of course, prompts a second question — why does the media persist in accepting current government and military pronouncements that the battle in Afghanistan is a battle against the Taliban and by extension a battle against global terrorism?

Surely the media and their courageous journalists know better? By continuing to define the conflict in Afghanistan along the simple black-white lines of us vs. them, the pro-democracy West vs. the fundamentalist Taliban, are the media not running the risk of perpetuating the fog of war behind which strategic, political and other mistakes too often find cover?